RICHMOND – Greensea Systems CEO Ben Kinnaman's wife likes to tell a story about when the couple was dating in their native North Carolina and he was working as a salvage diver, scrubbing the bottoms of boats in the winter.

Kinnaman grew up on the beach in Morehead City and loved the ocean. He loved doing just about anything on the water. As a salvage diver he worked on treasure hunts, messed around shipwrecks, changed propellers on boats. As Kinnaman put it, somebody loses something in the water, you put on a mask and an air tank and go look for it. Except in the winter.

"During the winter about the only work out there — because nobody is on the water to lose anything — is scrubbing the underside of a boat," Kinnaman said. "I drove this old Jeep Wagoneer. My wife would sit in the Jeep while I would put on all the wetsuits I owned and crawl under boats to scrub the junk off them. That's glamorous right there."

Things are a bit more glamorous for Kinnaman today as the owner of a Richmond company making control and navigation systems for remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs — robots that work underwater in oceans around the world. Last year, Kinnaman flew 117,000 miles and spent 103 nights in hotels supporting his customers.

"If salt water touches it, we've been there," he said.

The key to Kinnaman's success is the years he spent operating ROVs himself.

"I left diving, I wanted to go deeper so I went out and did ROVs all over the world," Kinnaman said.

Kinnaman knows what his clients need from experience.In 2006, he and his wife, Joanna, moved to Vermont to start a family and Greensea.

Locked in the attic

Greensea is essentially a software company, only this software comes packaged in sophisticated titanium control modules that can be retrofitted to the most widely used remotely operated vehicles in the world, supercharging their capabilities for exploration and work.

"When we started in 2006 developing the architecture upon which we would build all our products we laid out a technical road map starting with the first line of code to delivering commercial products to the unmanned vehicle industry," Kinnaman said. "On day 1 it was Joanna bringing the business together and myself and another engineer locked in the attic, literally, writing software."

From 2006 to 2008, Kinnaman only wrote software, intent on making the communication between man and machine — man and underwater robot — better. In addition to working as a salvage diver, Kinnaman had earned an undergraduate degree in physics from Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., and a graduate degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

"My wife and I slid all our chips across the table," Kinnaman said. "So we're all in. Everything. When you go out, you go out."

By 2008, Kinnaman felt ready to go after contracts for custom software development, building on the architecture he had developed over two years, called openSEA.

"What this software architecture does is provide a common operating platform for unmanned systems, addressing device interfaces, control and navigation and operator interfaces, man and machine communication," Kinnaman said. "So in 2008 we started soliciting business on this core architecture to customize and integrate it for particular applications. That's how we financed the road map. It's still a huge part of our business."

Kinnaman got started using had contacts from the years he spent in the field.

"Our industry is small enough," he said. "We knocked on doors. I called people I knew. One thing just led to another during those years. I was not interested in growing the business, I was interested in growing the technology."

Vermont's ocean industry capital

Kinnaman found that for most unmanned systems underwater, openSEA offered about a 95 percent solution to any given challenge from the get-go, requiring only a layer of customization.

"We put clothes on, that's it," he said. "You tell us what you want to dress up like and we put the clothes on."

That worked in Greensea's favor during the tough years of the Great Recession, when the company was going to market for the first time.

"We offered a big value add for institutions and companies," Kinnaman said. "They could use openSEA and cut development and ownership costs, cut maintenance costs, and have a quicker path to market and success."

Six years after emerging from his attic, Kinnaman is working with some of the leading ocean-going organizations in the world, including the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., founded by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google.

Greensea was selected by Schmidt to provide the navigation systems for its new robotic undersea research vehicle, which the Institute describes on its website as the "world's most advanced full ocean depth undersea robotic research vehicle," capable of operating at depths down to 36,000 feet below sea level.

Marybeth Gilliam, Greensea's new chief marketing officer, hired in January, said Schmidt's hybrid remotely operated vehicle will be "one of the world's only robotic vehicles capable of providing scientists real-time access to the deepest parts of the ocean."

And all of this from the corner of Main and Bridge streets in little Richmond, where Greensea operates out of a 19th-century building that formerly housed a corner market.

Wait. Richmond?

"I'm proud to say Richmond may be the capital of the ocean industry in Vermont," Kinnaman said.

Kinnaman and his wife had been visiting Vermont over the years to ski, then found themselves visiting in the summer time as well, as a "stress reliever."

The couple did their research before they made the move, investigating Vermont's small business community, technical community and family atmosphere.

"We are very deliberate people, to a fault at times," Kinnaman said. "We knew what we were after so we did our homework and research."

Deliberate to a fault, but not always deliberate. Take the selection of Richmond, for example.

"We had a real estate agent pick us up at the airport and drive us around," Kinnaman said. "The first town she drove us to was Richmond. I told my wife, 'Dang it, I like this place. Richmond!'"

The name of Kinnaman's company, Greensea, is a nod to the Green Mountains, and to the green color of Lake Champlain's water when you dunk your head under it, Kinnaman said.

The saga of Leroy Brown

Leroy Brown, who has the run of the Greensea offices in Richmond, is Kinnaman's very sociable brown Labrador retriever, six years old and sleek from regular hikes in the woods. Kinnaman said the dog helped inspire Greensea's latest technological development: feature-based navigation.

There's no GPS underwater. Traditional underwater navigation relies on measuring velocity and acceleration, called "inertial navigation." Kinnaman compares it to being pushed blindfolded on a furniture dolly in a gymnasium while dragging your hand on the floor to help gauge how fast you're moving. Suffice to say, it involves lots of math and sensors.

"There's a fundamental equation in inertial navigation that accuracy equals some relationship of size, cost and power," Kinnaman said. "If you say you want to be accurate you've got to be big and heavy, and it's got to use a lot of power and be really expensive, too. That's fine for nuclear submarines, but what about the little tiny vehicle that you need to put in an underwater tunnel, or the vehicles we rely on for port and harbor security?"

Kinnaman was taking his customary hike with Leroy Brown one winter morning when he realized he didn't need a GPS to get back to where he started because he was taking note of the trees and ponds and rocks he was passing by — landmarks that could guide him back to the beginning. That's feature-based navigation and it's what Greensea is bringing to underwater vehicles.

"We have a technology that allows underwater robots to detect features using sonar," Kinnaman said. "Every robot has a sonar because you can't really see underwater, so by extracting features from sonar data we can develop landmarks and we can develop a vehicle that understands its relationship to landmarks."

Those landmarks may be something as subtle as ripples of sand on the ocean floor.

"With a high-frequency sonar you can see any little landmark just like you were walking," Kinnaman said. "If you drained Lake Champlain and were walking over the bottom, it has ripples you can see. We can do the same thing with sonar."

Everyone at Greensea, except Marybeth Gilliam, wears the same shirt to work every day — a bluish grey, short-sleeved cotton work shirt with the employee's name in an oval patch on one side his chest, .

The shirt would not be out of place in a gas station, and that's exactly the way Kinnaman wants it, to remind his employees of who they're working for — people who are out there working on a deepwater wellhead, exploring the health of a reef, or investigating a seaway to check on whether there are any mines present.

"We're doing cutting edge stuff, but it's only good if it can be used," Kinnaman said. "If guys in the field can't use what we're building, there's no use in coming to work."

Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.